As many people have noted in regards to trends, they don’t happen all at once. This seems especially true of the blogging world (blogosphere? I just don’t like that word, feels too geeky, even for me), where often times trends seem to get rediscovered in waves. One of these waves is happening right now, starting just last weekend. I can’t say that this is the real order of events, but it is the order that I observed them in. It is entirely possible that some of these don’t have any bearing on each other, who knows. All the dates and times are from the blogs posts, not when I noticed them.
- BoingBoing discovers PubSubs new LinkRank on 12 Dec 2004 @ 8:51pm
- Jeremy Zawodny mentions his pubsub linkrank on 12 Dec 2004 @ 10:00pm
- Scoble discovers the new LinkRank feature on 13 Dec 2004 @ 2:29am
What struck me as funny about this is that two of the three mention this specifically as a new feature. I hadn’t ever really though of this as a new feature because I’ve been using it for months. I figured pretty much everyone who would be interested in it already knew about it. Guess I was wrong. I spent a couple of minutes trying to find when LinkRank first showed up, but I couldn’t find anything, so I fired off an email to Bob Wyman asking when it was first made available to the public.
The three blogs I noticed this on are fairly high profile, with lots of readers, I suspect this will cause another large wave of people discovering LinkRank. After doing a search over at Technorati my suspicions seem to be confirmed, there more than 20 posts about LinkRank listed in the last 20 hours. Over at Feedster there are about 26 posts in the last 20 hours about LinkRank.
It’s fun having the feeling of watching information flow from one person to the next. Imagine the kind of graphs you could generate if everyone provided link backs, correct time stamps and geographic details on their posts. I suppose it would look something like a world wide web (sorry, couldn’t resist).
Update 9:20 am 15 Dec 2004: Bob replied to my inquiry. Looks like LinkRank came out in “late spring”. So perhaps June at the latest? That would make the service six months old.
2 replies on “Discovery Lag Time: LinkRank”
Sorry that this is totally unrelated to the rest of your post, but I say we should start using “blogiverse” over “blogosphere”. I can’t stand “blogosphere”. I could live with “blogiverse”.
By the way, your wp-no-spam-comments-post.php thing stinks. I didn’t fill out my e-mail address so I got an error message, but when I hit back to correct it my comment had been erased.
Hi Joseph,
You are quite right about LinkRanks not being brand new, and many people skipped right by it when we first launched. What is new, however, is the ability to track the history – that wasn’t available before.
And yes, we could create some very cool graphs if only everyone put all the correct information on their blogs, including the blog hosters! Information that is both structured and complete is one of the utopias to which we all aspire (that graph, though, is asymptotic, imho!)
Cheers,
Salim